Pictures from Italy

· Penguin
Ebook
272
Pages

About this ebook

After Martin Chuzzlewit was published in 1844, Dickens deliberately took a break from novels to travel in Italy for almost a year.

Bored by many traditional tourist sites and repelled by the greed and empty rituals of the Catholic church, Dickens is far more attracted by urban desolation, the colourful life of the streets and visible signs of the nation's richly textured past. He is especially drawn to the costumes, cross-dressing and sheer exuberant energy of the Roman carnival. Although seldom overtly political,Pictures from Italy often touches on the corruption and cruelty of Italian history, the grinding poverty and a sense of continuing oppression lurking just below the surface. A thrilling travelogue which is also deeply revealing about its author's current anxieties and concerns, this neglected work deserves a secure place among the masterpieces of Dickens's maturity.

About the author

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

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